Hi,

I have been the IT admin at our company for a few years and have managed to create admin images, configure different options for different groups of computers and deploy this image. When a new major version comes out, I have used the previous image to create new image.

However, I'm never sure if I'm doing it the best way and what tips/experiences of others might help. Starting with Solidworks 2019, we are deploying to 2 sites with different license keys. I read things on this forum about AdminDirector.xml and users.xml - what are these? The official admin guide has no mention of them.

My specific questions are:

1. How best to ensure the same, consistent image, but with different license keys

2. When a service pack is released for a version, how best to upgrade. Eg, we are running 2018 sp2, and want to upgrade all computers to sp3?

3. Having deployed an admin image to computers, if I then want to amend the components (such as adding Flow Simulation) to a group, how can I do that? If I simply, amend the existing config in AdminImageOptionsEditor.exe and tick the Flow Simulation box, how will the computers learn/deploy that new component?

4. After deployment, in order to standardise all the settings, we manually visit each workstation (after the user has logged in) and run a restore of the registry settings to a saved set our Solidworks champion has created. The registry settings include file locations, saved views, keyboard shortcuts, etc. Is there a way to roll these settings during installation?

Thanks in advance.